Reflection
by Sionnain
Summary: His triumph is secure, but she haunts him still in the mirror's reflection. One-shot, fic exchange challenge with Lunalelle.


**AN: **Dedicated to Lunalelle, for our fic-exchange.

**  
Reflection**

"_When the senses are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness, who can stand?"_—William Blake, _Lullaby_

When he looks into the mirror, sometimes he only sees himself staring back from the cold glass.

In those times, his crimson eyes are blazing and empty. There is nothing left within him that the magic has not corrupted, nothing left he has not willingly sacrificed to the darkness within.

There are times, which he will admit to no one, that he sees _her. _

Then, his eyes are not so empty. In those moments, something remains that he has not been able to destroy completely, despite his fervent wish to do so.

_When she first was his prisoner, he tormented her with a thousand devils, a thousand knives to cut her mind and her body, tomake her bleed._

"_You will not break me," she cried, hands clenched in agony but chin tilted, proud and defiant._

In those moments when he sees her in the mirror, she is standing behind him and she is staring at him. There is a quiet sadness in her face, and if he still had a heart her expression would have broken it.

He does not speak to her, but she speaks to him.

"_Tell me where he is, you foolish girl," he growled at her, pointing the wand as she writhed beneath his Cruciatus. _

"_No!" she cried, and bit her lip in her pain. He watched the blood run down her smooth skin. _

_The urge was there to lick it off of her, even then, even in the beginning._

She likes to come at night, when he is alone. His empire rises outside of the walls of his chosen liar, outside his word is law and all tremble at the mere sound of voice.

Inside, his world is hers. It is now the only place where she exists.

Sometimes in the reflection, she is wearing a black cloak and a mask like his Death Eaters did before the War ended. Now they dress in fine robes made of the most expensive of fabrics, for they are the aristocracy in his New World Order.

When she wears the mask, he finds he leans towards her image in the mirror. There was always something so primal and sinister about the masks, and to see her in it stirs his blood.

"_Your friends will never triumph, my dear. They have lost Dumbledore, and Snape has suffered his penance and returned to me. There is nothing to be gained by your defiance except for pain."_

"_You will kill me, but it does not matter." Her voice throbbed with the indignation only the righteous can still feel when they are vanquished._

"_I might," he said, amused. "Rest assured, you will break before I do so."_

"_Never," she vowed._

_He called to one of his faithful, and watched with detached amusement while he beat her. _

_Her skin turned purple from the beatings, and he remained quiet in the room so that he could drink in the sound of her tears as she cried on the cold stone floor._

If she does not wear the mask and the cloak, she comes to him in the mirror with her hair wild around her head, looking like Medusa with a frightening crown of snakes. The dancing flames of the candles play in her dark brown eyes, and in the mirror they sparkle like dark jewels.

"You never did know when to stop," she whispers, reaching out towards him.

Only when she tries to touch him does he close his eyes.

The touch he cannot bear—the touch is what will destroy him, and she will succeed in death where her champion failed in life.

_Bellatrix liked to prick her with her long, long nails and rake them down her face. It made Hermione look like her tears had carved thin, bloody welts on her face._

_He would laugh at her then, but she kept her chin up and met his stare bravely. He knew that she was ready and willing to die, but he refused to kill her._

"_Snakes like to play with their prey," he would tell her._

There are times she appears before him with a crown of the brightest of lights behind her head, as if she is on fire.

"I am the firebrand, like Paris of Troy," she says, voice amused. "He brought destruction to Priam's empire by his birth alone. Would you lose me on the streets of your own Empire, merely to watch the fire as it consumes what you have struggled so long to build? I know how much you crave destruction, my lord."

She addresses him with the title she refused him in life.

_He circled her as she lay, proud and bound before him._

"_He is dead," he said pleasantly. "He died well, but he did die."_

_She made not a sound, not a tear fell._

"_Have you nothing to say to that, girl?"_

"_No," she said, and while her voice was slightly dulled there was that tinge of defiance that infuriated him._

"_You will address me as 'my lord'," he said to her, "or you will feel pain like you have never known."_

"_I will never call you that," she said. _

_She never did._

"You know your Death Eaters plot against you—Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape, they think to rule in your stead. They think you mad, hiding in your chambers and staring in your mirror."

He hisses at her, but he does not speak. Nagini curls around him, although sometimes in the mirror the snake is entwined around her body, and she is rubbing the serpent's head and smiling at him.

"_Do you want me to kill you, Miss Granger?" He had her brought to his chambers, dressed in a sheer garment meant to humiliate her. _

_She is bound across from him in the chair, her legs splayed and her hands charmed to the sides of the chair so she could not cover herself. He would run his eyes slowly over her, because he could taste the fear and the shame on the air when he did so._

"_I do not care what you do to me."_

There are nights she is dressed in that self-same sheer purple drape, the color so loved by the emperors of Rome. Her body is lush and defined beneath it, and she wears jewels and a crown on her head. There is no shame on her face now.

"I understand you have put Severus Snape to death," she says, raising her arms and twirling as if she is a delighted child showing off a new dress. "That was wise; he only wanted to supplant you, and he has proven again you cannot trust him."

He refuses to speak to her of affairs of state, even though it galls him that she is correct. Snape's plan to overthrow him would have succeeded if he had not sent Nagini to spy on his former Death Eater.

Lucius Malfoy was even then screaming under Bellatrix Lestrange's wand. If he lived, Voldemort would welcome him back. The pain would cleanse the proud blond wizard and disabuse him of the notion that the Dark Lord as easily fooled.

"That is wise," she says, eyes aglow. "He will be even more loyal than you could possibly imagine."

She knows about loyalty, of this he is certain.

"_What will it matter, silly girl, if you tell me where your precious order was located? I have told you that I defeated them, I have told you that Harry Potter fell at my feet at last."_

_She turned her face away from him, and said nothing. No amount of pain would make her speak. No torment was great enough to drag that information from her soul. It remained pure and shining within her, and until he extinguished that light she would defeat him. _

_She would not die with that light within her, this he had vowed. _

He suffers through the attention of fools in the daytime, where he gives his orders and laughs when they try to lie to him. Lucius Malfoy has earned his forgiveness, though he is weak after prolonged exposure to Bellatrix's skillful talents. Malfoy has assets he cannot lose, so he does not kill the man as he often itches to do.

"He will not betray you, as long as you reward him," she tells him, and he is quiet as he sips his wine from a heavy crystal goblet and watches her in the mirror.

He does not want to listen to what she says, but she is usually correct. When she speaks of dissension and unrest, he finds it where she has said it will be.

The ghost of the woman who hated him has become his strongest ally.

Even though it is not possible, he often wonders if she will be standing behind him in the flesh should he turn around.

_He had begun to probe her dreams, trying to find out what it was she feared the most. In her mind he saw her parents and her friends dead, but that was inevitable._

_Finally, he had her brought to his rooms and cast "Imperio" upon her, and he made her strip for him. He liked the way she fought his curse, liked the way he could read her mind that screamed at him even as she smiled and did his bidding._

"_I will extinguish your light forever, my dear, and then I will kill you," he would tell her as she smiled up at him, lying beneath him. He would hear screaming and crying in his mind, even as she embraced him and ran her hands down his back. She sobbed in his head even as she pulled him closer. _

"You must keep order in your ranks," she tells him, and in the mirror he sees her reclining on his bed, brushing her hair. "If you do not, your empire will fall."

He sips his claret, and as usual says nothing. His soulless eyes glitter as he stares at her.

"I remember when you would take me here," she says, hands trailing down her arms lightly. "I would scream at you to stop, in my mind, but my body would be willing. Do you miss my screaming, or do you miss my willingness to capitulate to you?"

_He vowed there would be a time he did not have to use the Imperio curse, and that was when he knew he would have broken her._

_The Death Eaters would taunt her; call her the Dark Lord's Whore, as he would force her to parade naked through his council chambers that adjourned his private quarters, and she would do so with her eyes fixed straight ahead. If she walked too fast or tried to cover herself, he would let them trip her, or curse her, or hex her. _

_When she smirked at his Death Eaters, tossing her hair and accusing them of being jealous for courting his favor, he laughed delightedly and told them to stand down when they would have hurt her._

_He no longer wanted to kill her. _

"I remember what it was like to die," she tells him one night, and he digs his fingers into his skin but does not feel the pain. "Would you like me to tell you what happened, when I did?"

For the first time, he answers her.

"I know what it is like to kill. I do not know what it is like to die, and I shall never know."

She stares at him in the mirror and shakes her head back and forth slowly. "I have never killed, but oh, how I have died…."

Her image fades, there is something fierce moving through him that he thinks might be pain. It has been so long, he is not sure what it is he feels at all.

_She curled up in his bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, and would not look at him. He knew it was because she had cast off his Imperious curse finally, and yet had still cried out beneath him in pleasure. Her mind had successfully fought him off, but her body had betrayed her. _

_When he looked at her afterwards, the light had finally faded from her eyes. He stroked her cheek and asked her in a quiet voice, "where is he, Hermione?"_

"_Why? You have killed him, without my giving you this knowledge. Why does it matter so much to you, to hear me tell you what no longer matters?"_

"_Because it means I have broken you, and that you are mine."_

"I can stay with you no longer," she tells him, and he sees she is lightly tracing the Dark Mark he had forced on her skin in the early days of her capture. "I must go to those who loved me. I am ready to seek their forgiveness."

"You do not require their forgiveness."

She laughs at his imperious tone and shakes her head. "You will understand, when your time comes, what it is to answer to the souls of the dead."

"I tell you once more, I will not die, Hermione."

There seems to be fire covering her—bright and furious, the light he had systematically destroyed rising to engulf her in one final glorious conflagration of flame. "That is because you are already dead. Their souls will come for you, regardless."

_When he returned to her, she was trembling in a rage._

"_You lied!" she screamed, and she scratched him with her nails, trying to rake out his eyes. "You lied to me! You did not know where he was! I heard Malfoy crowing about it, about how you went to their hideout and killed them all in their sleep! You had not defeated Harry!"_

_He laughed at her, bitterly, as he easily caught her hands as she fought against him. "You expected me to fight like a Gryffindor? I am Slytherin's heir, Hermione. I am cunning and I will strike while they sleep. I will be the serpent in the grass."_

"_I betrayed them! I thought you had killed them, and I gave you the information you never would have had because you lied to me! I thought they were already dead!" Her tortured wails wrapped around him, and it was a sweet embrace. _

"_I have never claimed not to lie." He disentangled her and turned on his heel, walked away from her with his dark cloak billowing behind him and his boots clicking on the stone floor. _

_She screamed for hours, a madwoman collapsed in a heap on his floor, tearing at her hair in and wailing in her beautiful rage. _

_When he finally heard her fall quiet he opened the door. She was collapsed on the floor, and there was blood everywhere. Like Jocasta, she had torn her eyes out with the pin of the serpent brooch he had gifted her with the night she had capitulated to him, the night he had left her sleeping in his bed to kill everyone she held dear._

_She was barely alive, the blood loss was that severe. He ranted and raged, and summoned healers, but they tell him she wants nothing more than to die, and she had lost too much blood to live. _

_He killed them in his rage, but their deaths did not quench the flame of his fury. _

_In her final moments, she reached a hand up and pressed it against his lips. Her last words are his name, but he did not know if it was a curse or a promise._

He watches in the mirror as her image fades, and all that is left is the light he had destroyed.

The glow is too much for him, for eyes that are used to the darkness and that have long since lost the ability to adjust to the harsh glare of truth and light. He throws the goblet at the mirror, and it cracks down the center.

He leaves the chamber in a purposeful stride, forcing his mind to forget her, and engage instead in the intricacies of running an empire. It is daylight, and for him, that means it is time to rule.

There will be time in the darkness to mourn, if indeed that is what he does.

The light shines in the chamber, sparkling almost cheerfully on the shards of shattered glass that lay scattered on the floor. The sun illuminates the writing on the mirror:

_The Mirror of Erised._

He has left the chamber, so he does not hear the softness of her laughter.

Finis


End file.
